The Near
Field Communications (NFC) market is just
beginning to gain traction and is set to blow up as more and more firms
start to head to the market. An indicator of how big an new industry can become
is to look at the size and reach of the firms that are entering into the
market. With NFC, there are already some big names throwing their weight behind
the tech for many different uses.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon teamed up for a NFC payment system trial
called Isis.
The system is designed to allow users to make payments for goods using their
smartphones and the wireless payment network backbone. Google has also started talking
about NFC tech and integrated NFC into its latest version of Android.

Of all the companies that are betting on NFC, Google may be in one of the best
positions since it has an NFC-enabled OS with Gingerbread and there are
hundreds of thousands of devices running its OS on the market already. Google
is reportedly eying a new payment and advertising system according to two sources
close to the system cited by BusinessWeek.

The system would allow the user to walk into a store and pay for things by
swiping or bumping the phone against the cash register. The NFC market will be
huge with predictions that it will account for as much as a third of the $1.13
trillion global mobile payment market by 2014.

Payment giant PayPal is also looking to get into the NFC payments market in the
second half of 2011 reports BusinessWeek. PayPal is expected to
collaborate with other people in the industry as a way to process and receive
the payments that are generated by Google's NFC system for example.

BusinessWeek quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt from a NFC conference
in November 2010 describing the system Google foresees, "You'll be able to
walk in a store and do commerce. You'd bump for everything and eventually
replace credit cards."

Google is working on both ends of the NFC ecosystem. It has the mobile OS and
plans for the payment system in place, and it is also already seeing merchants
around the country with NFC tags that will be readable by devices that support
NFC. The first locations to get the tags were some retailers in Portland,
Oregon that were given windows tags which gives users with NFC-capable devices
store hours and allows them to get reviews of the business and rate the
business. The tags were part of the Google Hotspot test project.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007